In 2018, I stumbled across the trailer for the first installment of the Halloween horror franchise reboot trilogy. I’m not the biggest horror fan, but I can appreciate a scary film if I think it’s well-made. Alien, Ridley Scott’s genre-defining 1979 classic is perhaps my favorite film of all time, for example, and I think everyone should see 1999’s game-changing The Blair Witch Project at least once. Not incidentally, I think John Carpenter’s original 1978 Halloween is excellent and artful in a way that other so-called “slasher” films simply can’t touch.
Likewise, I thought Carpenter did an amazing job of setting a suspenseful tone with 1982’s The Thing, another classic. Interestingly enough, as a pre-teen with a strong aversion to gore who scared very easily, The Thing didn’t scare me or turn me off with its over-the-top body horror. I’m not sure why that is, but like a spicy food that one realizes they have a tolerance for, I’m able to just enjoy that film for its craftsmanship and story while not squirming in my seat with my heart pounding. I also don’t walk away from it unsettled, with that heightened sense that something’s going to pop out from around the next corner.
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Carpenter’s touch when it comes to atmosphere and tone just can’t be denied, and it’s there in his work outside the horror genre as well, in his landmark titles like Escape From New York (1981), Starman (1984), and They Live (1988). As my dear friend Mike once pointed out about the original Halloween, Carpenter managed to imbue the cozy glow of autumn with a heavy shade of menace, which is a hell of an achievement if you think about it.
So, because of my high regard for the original film, I clicked play on the trailer for the 2018 reboot, directed by David Gordon Green. I had an immediate — and very negative — visceral reaction that left a nasty aftertaste. To this day, even passing exposure to images of this more recent incarnation of super-killer Michael Myers brings with it a potent, unwelcome sense of dread that I find myself having to fight-off.
Ultimately, I end up putting my foot down, grabbing ahold of myself, and refusing to let the feeling amplify into a feedback loop. I’ve had to actively repeat the process since watching that trailer — when Halloween Kills was released three years later, and then again with Halloween Ends, which hit theaters this trick-or-treating season and is currently streaming on Peacock. The first two parts of the trilogy, meanwhile, have been streaming on HBO.
My daughter was less than a year old when I watched that trailer in 2018. At that point, I'd spent 9-10 months absorbed in a heightened state of rapture, with my brain basically flooded by oxytocin the entire time. I recently described what that was like here:
At that stage in parenting, I was in the grip of a near-constant oxytocin high that was extremely powerful — almost debilitating. I would hold my baby daughter for a few hours and feel so thoroughly enveloped by euphoria that all I could do was lie down afterwards. I’ve often joked that I’ll never need to try opium after experiencing THAT because I must now have some sense of what it’s like.
At the same time, I was also feeling this undercurrent of primal terror. A baby is so fragile and delicate and helpless that your brain just [completely orients itself around] making sure the child doesn’t get harmed. But the first sensation smothered the other, like a shriek of panic muffled by a thick, super-soft comforter.
It was quite intense.
Aside from my acute hyper-vigilance, I was — as any new parent should be — in thrall to my feeling of awe at the miracle of life. Just putting my face up to her face would cause me to marvel at her little flat nose and the wonderful sensation of her smooth, round cheeks and smooth forehead…
There’s a moment in the 2018 trailer where a woman cowers behind a bathroom-stall door as Myers terrorizes her by letting a set of bloody teeth fall from his hand. Bathed as I was in the warm, fuzzy appreciation I felt towards my daughter, I was really jarred by what felt to me like a reveling in the destruction of the body.
"Fuck the people who made this," I thought to myself.
I was incensed. There was no way to watch that and not take it personally. It felt gratuitous and cheap, a direct affront to this delicate, vulnerable, sacred life I cradled in my arms daily. The heavy metal musician Max Cavalera once said that when you “make life” — i.e: when you bring children into the world — you’re no longer inclined to write lyrics like “I didn’t ask to be born,” a line Cavalera penned for the legendary metal tune “Dead Embryonic Cells.”
Cavalera wasn’t talking specifically about horror films, which he and his musician/horror author son Igor enjoy watching together, but his quote came to mind in a big way nevertheless when I reacted to that image of Michael Myers with the teeth. At the time, I just couldn’t compute why anyone would choose to transmit more destruction of the body out into the world considering that, if you have an appetite for gruesome carnage, there’s no shortage of avenues to find it in real life, which gives us more than enough actual horror to grapple with.
And as much as I admire John Carpenter, I had a “fuck him too” moment when, asked in 2021 about the ratcheted-up brutality and gore of Halloween Kills (which he helped score with his son Cody), he answered with all the awareness of a 13 year-old boy. Actually, that’s an insult to 13 year-olds everywhere: “This is the movie,” Carpenter gushed, “that every horror director wants to make. We want to kick ass! We don’t wanna be pansies!”
To be fair, Carpenter is generally far more insightful than that (such as in this 1988 TV interview), and he did veer the 2021 conversation back to a more thoughtful place by drawing a contrast with Hostel, Eli Roth’s 2005 foray into the “torture porn” sub-genre: “The thing about the violence in Halloween Kills is that it’s not cruel [by comparison]. The intention is not cruel. Michael is a force. He’s a force of evil, and we watch what he does.”
Needless to say, I don’t have the stomach for films like Hostel and Saw. I honestly think I would pass right the fuck out if I tried to sit through one of those. And it would take months to cleanse the psychic residue from my system. On the other hand, I didn’t flinch much at the torture depicted in Takashi Miike’s 1999 horror drama Audition because I felt like that film was anchored by intention.
Oddly enough, Miike was able to invest that film’s sadism with a dose of understanding for its characters that can only be described as empathetic. Then again, just watching the trailer for Miike’s 2001 “ultra-violent” landmark Ichi The Killer was enough to make me feel like I was about to throw up. The same friend I mentioned above once referred to Asian ultra-violent cinema as “dead and inhumane.” I don’t think he was wrong.
It’s no surprise that Audition, Ichi The Killer, and Asian ultra-violent movies in general were big influences on Eli Roth, who actually gave Miike a cameo in Hostel. Famously, the whole premise for Hostel was hatched during a conversation between Roth and Pulp Fiction/Kill Bill director Quentin Tarantino.
From the Wiki page for Hostel:
While swimming in [Quentin] Tarantino's pool, Roth brainstormed an idea for a low-budget horror film based on a Thai "murder vacation" website he came across on the dark web.[4] Tarantino loved the idea and encouraged Roth to immediately start writing a draft that day, which later formed the basis for Hostel.[5]
When I imagine that conversation going down, I picture two impish, emotionally-stunted cretins egging each other on. Roth, however, makes it impossible for me to just write him off that way. In this interview taped around the release of Hostel, Roth stresses that real-life horrors are much more de-sensitizing than anything a person can put on film, drawing particular attention to mass shootings, the Iraq War, and the George W. Bush administration’s delayed response to Hurricane Katrina:
Fair enough, but watching that interview I get the impression that Roth addresses the sadistic depravity of his film head-on while simultaneously copping-out and passing the buck. I realize I might come across as a prude who doesn’t grasp the fundamental fact that horror films are supposed to be fiction. But I’ve always found the “it’s just a movie” defense flimsy, evasive, and just flat-out obtuse. You know who else apparently agreed? None other than infamous serial murderer Ted Bundy himself.
Bundy’s insights into such matters are the subject of detective Robert D. Keppel’s 2010 true-crime book The Riverman: Ted Bundy And I Hunt For The Green River Killer. In a chapter titled “The Slasher Film Festival Strategy,” Bundy recommends that the Seattle police heavily promote an especially "lurid" horror film with overtones of sexual violence. Bundy offers that the police could take pics of every male who attends, in addition to their license plates.
I could definitely see this approach sending the Fangoria / Bloody Disgusting crowd into cries of unfair persecution — not to mention the ACLU. Of course, they’d be right. But, much like the debate over first-person shooter games, it probably doesn’t serve us to approach these issues from a binary perspective. It’s far more daunting to try to find an answer in the murky gray area. That’s where we would need to look, and looking there requires not only courage but the ability to accept paradox.
Without digging into the clinical findings, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of people who consume violent media aren’t compelled to act-out in violent ways. It’s the small minority that leave us in a conundrum. It would be foolish to just dismiss the question of whether there might be some correlation between violent imagery and violent acts. And people like Bundy should know. But finding a way to legislate our way through this kind of issue — or even effectively anticipate it on a social level — is basically impossible.
It may not seem obvious, but I’m vehemently opposed to censorship, particularly the insidious kind that dominates today, where the risk of punitive censure from the public and corporate partners bowing to the will of the mob corners artists into self-censorship and pressures audiences into feeling like their inner responses to art are public property to be policed. I don’t find that healthy or constructive at all. In fact, I can’t think of anything more gross. So I’ve become something of a first-amendment absolutist, which puts me on the same side of this issue as people who vomit things out into our collective consciousness that I’d rather weren’t there. Such is the nature of the beast…
Believe it or not, I see value in horror films. And even if I didn’t: tough shit! Too many people enjoy them for any of us to try and gloss-over the fact that sadism, torture, extreme violence, and atrocity are simply part of the human condition. And even I would hold firm to the argument that horror films don’t put that stuff into people. Can exposure to graphic film depictions of violence traumatize and de-sensitize viewers? Sure, but I’d say the seeds of depravity exist within each and every one of us in ways our minds are reluctant to comprehend — which is precisely why horror can be useful, because it nudges us to peer behind the curtain to spot the monster that lurks inside the self.
Our species has had to be violent in order to survive. We’ve survived in large part because of the urge to hunt, kill and butcher living things — an instinct that just sits in modern-age humans like undigested meat. No doubt it's healthier to find a release for it in movies than taking it out on each other. So in a very real sense, we are Michael Myers which, I would argue, is one of the reasons why people keep going back to watch — to try and get in touch with an aspect of ourselves that's been buried beneath all those layers of "civilization."
Simultaneously, horror films allow us to connect with the primal fear that has been our day-to-day reality for the majority of humanity’s existence. Stopping to reflect on the raw animal power of killers like Michael Myers or Jason from the Friday The 13th franchise, I can’t help but notice a feline quality in the way they move. I wonder if the man-eating big cats that humans had to contend with for tens of thousands of years have left a permanent impression in our brains, so much so that we actively crave a simulation of the feeling of being hunted. In the absence of natural predators, perhaps, movie monsters step in to fill the vacancy.
I also think you can make an argument that horror films actually increase empathy, remind people to be vigilant about self-preservation, and help people confront and process death. And, as counter-intuitive as it might seem, horror films might actually help people live more fully by taking their stress down a notch. By encouraging us to celebrate the destruction of the body, these films can roundaboutly put as at-ease about life being temporary. Just imagine if everyone in the world were as resistant to gore as I am: we’d never have any successful surgeries!
And there are also clearly sensitive, astute, conscientious people who watch these films — like YouTuber Haunted Hippie, for instance:
I’ve long planned on hosting a panel discussion featuring women who love horror, because I think the overtones there — of hunting, predation, sexual violence, trauma and, yes, the dark allure of male power — are fascinating to say the least…
In the summer of 2019, about six months after I watched the Halloween trailer, my eyes were opened — mind blown and assumptions summarily shattered — when I went to see the death metal band Cannibal Corpse in concert and saw women in the crowd singing along to every word, including their long-running concert staple “Stripped, Raped And Strangled.” They didn’t play “Fucked With A Knife,” “Addicted To Vaginal Skin,” or “Entrails Ripped From A Virgin’s Cunt” that night, but pretty much every Cannibal Corpse song is about hacking bodies to bits, and it was quite revealing to see women responding so enthusiastically.
My stance against creative puritanism aside, though, I’m not opposed to calling for self-reflection on the part of the people who create and distribute art. I’ve done so many times in print, including with Cannibal Corpse and a heap of other metal bands. I should add that I enjoyed the shit out of that Cannibal Corpse show, too. And I will always stand on the side of artists being given room to make whatever they feel compelled to create, for better or worse. As Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler put it so beautifully when asked about rap group The 2 Live Crew in 1988 (the height of the controversy surrounding them): “Some of those lyrics bother me — but so what?”
Nevertheless, I will always push back with a simple “but what’s your point?” That question can only work constructively in a censorship-free environment, but by the same token I feel that people who grow up in societies with free speech tend to take it for granted — to the point where they won’t even entertain the question in the first place. We’ve got nothing to lose from asking the question…
When the broadcasters on primetime NFL games began reading ad spots for Halloween Kills in 2021, with the masked visage of Michael Myers appearing in the lower third between plays, I was left wondering why such grimness was being pumped into people’s homes during a TV event that was ostensibly meant to serve as family entertainment — while much of the country was still grappling with the collective grief of a pandemic, no less. Again, what was the point? Does anyone — filmmakers, network and ad execs — have a satisfactory answer? Why am I signing-up for Michael Myers to be dumped into my thoughts when I sit down to find relief from real life during a football game?
David Gordon Green and Halloween Kills lead actress Jamie Lee Curtis made it a point to frame that film as a statement on the way inter-generational trauma impacts women. Haunted Hippie definitely responded to it on that level. But as I continue to do my best to parent a small child, the idea of a murderous force invading the home as “entertainment” is just unpalatable to me.
To each their own, I guess — or maybe not! When I was a teenager, I would lurk at the back of the video store around the corner from my school, staring transfixed at the backs of the boxes of VHS tapes for films like Friday The 13th Part III. These were movies I’d heard my friends in my neighborhood talk about. I didn’t have the nerve to watch them, but of course I was drawn to them too. I’m sure I cut a very strange figure, just standing there staring…
Not much has changed. These days, if a new scary movie ends up on my radar, there’s a good chance I’ll read a bunch of reviews and binge on YouTube reaction videos. Sure, I maintain a safe distance, but the fact is that the curiosity’s irresistible. So if I, of all people, feel the pull of these films, it says a lot. At the end of the day, it looks like horror has a universal appeal. And there’s no point in denying it. How we’re supposed to live with the implications of that in a healthy way is anybody’s guess. I have no idea.
I’ve come to learn one thing, though, which is that I can recognize that the culture I live in is sick, and that the movies that emerge from it reflect that sickness somehow. At the same time, I can also recognize that I’m likely to mis-diagnose the problem. Worse, were I ever to be so foolish to think that we should shield people from these movies, it turns out that I’d be doing a disservice to people like Haunted Hippie, Possessed By Horror, all the women rocking out at that Cannibal Corpse show, and pretty much everybody else.
When it comes to horror, I suspect that the poison contains elements of the cure and vice-versa. Remove one and you only amplify the other. It’s up to everyone to navigate through the fog in their own way. I look forward to hosting a panel discussion soon. In the meantime, I didn’t post this before Halloween because for me that holiday (one of my favorites) is a time for parenting and reveling in my daughter’s joy for life.
In other words: Fuck Michael Myers. I’m busy.
And, ha. 40 years ago John Carpenter told David Letterman that “If I was an 8 year-old kid, I’d want to see this movie immediately. No matter what my parents said, I’d go right out and see it.” That pretty much says it all!
<3 SRK